Analgesic
by Pantomime Banjo
Summary: Ice hockey is both famous and infamous for fights, but it's just as easy to get hurt by accident on the ice as it is to provoke the players, as Matthew Williams can testify. Well, almost. Requested by Lispet.


Request from the very awesome Lispet!

Prompt: crack/fluff with injured!Canada and whoever

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>Warnings: Nonsense, mild violence and language<p><p>

I slammed the blades down into the ice over and over again. There was already no way his team could catch up, but I refused to even think about missing one chance at another point. I wanted this defeat to be so total, so overwhelming, that he'd never pick on me again, but Alfred himself was right behind me, as if to prove that that was completely impossible. I could practically hear his speech on how impossible it was to break down a "totally awesome hero" like himself already.

I should've invited Ivan, made him play with Al, had someone like Francis in the goal, given him Berwald or Tino..

I'd still win.

"Williams, look out!" Maple, I got distracted.

Oh well, it only took a second for me to have the puck across the rink, safely advancing on his poor, abused goalie from a new angle.

_'Now just where-' _For all his posturing, Al wasn't anywhere near as quick as me, in more ways than one, and apparently, he hadn't noticed that I wasn't really a threat to him anymore until _after_ he'd slammed me into the barrier.

Ow, fuck. Well, there was now officially no way I could claim he wasn't taking me seriously for once; that had cracked the plexiglass from top to bottom.

Wait a second, _ow. _That.. was _not _a normal feeling. Did.. did I still have a shoulder?

Maybe. I didn't see any blood, but my jersey _was_ red. It would take a while for it to soak through the white patches, and I wasn't entirely sure that I was even checking the right spot; that weird shape just.. did not look like my shoulder was supposed to. Not that I spent a lot of time admiring my right shoulder, of all things, but I'd seen it enough to at least have a vague idea of what it was and wasn't supposed to look like.

The weird thing next to my head definitely fit into the latter category of shoulders and shoulder impostors.

...Anyway, the ref had apparently stopped the game while I was trying to figure out how many body parts and weird, possibly malignant growths I had, because two of the striped figures were now on either side of me, trying to keep my idiot brother away. I couldn't actually figure out what anyone was saying, but I'd been around long enough to know what they needed to ask. Whether or not that was actually what the idiots were asking was completely different, but they'd just have to deal. "It's fine," I told them. "He didn't do it on purpose, just let me sit down; I'm done here."

Despite my usual invisibility and volume, someone managed to understand, and one of the Veilleux helped me over to the bench, opening that wonderful little door for me. How lovely. "M'hci," I mumbled, too distracted for trivial things like _vowels_ now that I was starting to feel my shoulder again and really wishing that it _was_ just gone. Stupid shoulder. Besides, Tino could more than handle all of those neglected vowels and then some; that guy was the God-damned _vowel master_.

..And the lake master. Seriously. But that's a story for another day, maybe a day when I was thinking of these things because of too much beer or vodka out with my friends instead of pieces of fragmented helmet jamming themselves into all sorts of place they had no right to be. Rude.

Ignoring my incredibly inconsiderate helmet for the moment, I leaned back against the glass, managing to balance myself on it and whoever was on my left. I could barely see them leading Alfred into the penalty box from my position; he looked like he was still apologizing. Idiot. I'd had worse.

I think.

Maybe.

After fighting Ivan.

..That sounded about right.

"...ou feed mumbluntz?"

"...What.." ..the hell is that, and why would I feed it? Oh no, I already had obnoxiously overconfident Danes and Prussians to feed at whenever the hell they felt like letting themselves into my house; I was _not _about to add whatever the hell _that_ was to the list. It sounded pretty damn needy.

I should get a guard moose to keep those sorts of things from finding me.

Yes.. I could see him now, seven feet tall, with a pretty red collar and a shiny little tag reading Melvin. He was beautiful, and I sniffled appreciatively just at the thought of my wonderful dream moose chomping down on a grinning head of white hair.

Moose could be such _magnificent_ bastards.

"Do you need an ambulance?" Oh. _Oh._ I didn't need to feed anything.

Hooray!

"Non, non. Just let me get back to David after this." Ah, Dr. David. He was such a wonderful man, always so willing to hang around our games.

Apparently I'd hit my head harder than I thought.

I _hate _David.

Oh well. It was 21-2 with only a few minutes left in the third period, and the American team didn't even look like they wanted to be there now that Alfred was gone.

A nearly impossible loss did that to a guy, I guess, but really, what did they expect, skating into a grudge match with a nearly 300-year-old _expert_ on the game out for their captain's blood? Logic? _More than one point per period?_ Like hell.

Anyway, the end seemed to come rather quickly, and my teammates helped me onto the ice to celebrate and thank the poor, stupid (so very, _very_ stupid) Americans for trying.

"Mattie, bro, I'm really sorry," Alfred attested, rambling on. "I swear, I didn't mean to, and-" And on.

And _on_.

And _**on**_.

I might have helped my teammates kill him if he went on much longer – the headache I was developing seriously limited my sympathy just as much as it increased the bloody injuries Melvin the head-moose was delivering to the hoser – but, thankfully, his forwards dragged him away from us before anyone actually hit him. Or ate him slowly to nourish his majestic, hulking form.

With no actual distraction, I started to really notice just how much everything on my right side hurt, _damn _that helmet for not _knocking me out _when it invaded Nunavut, so I tapped at the nearest person in red and let myself be shuffled off to David, the prick.

Life was not going to be fun once I was coherent again.

Notes:

the Veilleux: to quote my wonderful, hockey-loving friend, Jake, "Veilleux is like the Evans of Quebec; not as obnoxiously common as Smith or Jones, but still everywhere" when I asked him if some Veilleux guy hadn't _totally_ been playing for our team before (he hadn't; I was just being stupid)

Tino, the vowel and lake master: "perusteellisesti" is Finnish for "thoroughly; in depth." It contains _seven vowels._ Every Finnish word I've seen is similar (but, please, I don't mean any of this offensively). There are also no less than 187,888 different lakes in Finland.

Tino/Berwald as Alfred's goalie: "While there are 68 total members of the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF), 162 of 177 medals at the IIHF World Championships have been taken by these seven nations: Canada, the Czech Republic, **Finland**, Russia, Slovakia, **Sweden** and the United States. Of the 64 medals awarded in men's competition at the Olympic level from 1920 on, only six medals did not go to the one of those countries." Wikipedia.


End file.
